Citizen Science

NASA-funded Community Snow Observations (CSO) project recruits citizen scientists to help collect snow depth observations – anytime and anywhere, and then they can submit their observations via the mobile-sharing platform Mountain Hub. Co-host Caroline Nickerson chats with one of the project leaders, David Hill, and one of CSO’s volunteers, Katie O’Connell, talk about the importance of collecting snow depth data around the world--how that informs both local knowledge of things like avalanches and water availability, to how data contributed by everyday hikers can better inform global models of snow availability and its relationship to the water cycle. You can find a transcript here.

This episode spotlights EarthEcho International and one of the organization’s signature programs, the EarthEcho Water Challenge. Kicking off in March each year on World Water Day, EarthEcho encourages participation in the Water Challenge year-round. Founded by the grandchildren of ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, EarthEcho's mission is to inspire young people throughout the world to take action for a more sustainable future. Caroline Nickerson talks with Sean Russel, the Manager for EarthEcho's Water Challenge program, and Katelyn Higgins, a student leader in EarthEcho and member of the group's Youth Leadership Council. They discuss what it means to incorporate youth voices at every level of the organization, how to explain water chemistry to kids, how water monitoring can turn into water action, and how you can get involved in the science to better understand and protect the waters where you live. A transcript is available here.

This episode is all about trees and how users of the Curio can map and monitor urban and community trees globally. Terrence Pickles is the founder of Exeter Trees, which attempts to document and preserve every tree in Exeter, in the UK, using both YouTube and the Curio app, which was developed by our second guest, Paul Hickey. Co-host Caroline Nickerson talks to Terrence and Paul about their motivations for doing the work they do, the kinds of results they’ve had so far, and how you can get started using Curio to better see and understand the whole of the world, or at least the trees you walk by every day. A transcript can be accessed here.

 

Music: Discount Fireworks, "Dots 1" and "Five," used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 US license.

This episode features a conversation between Samantha Harrington, ISeeChange's Digital Community Manager, and Amber Kleinman, a volunteer who uses ISeeChange to document weather events in Paonia, a small town in western Colorado. ISeeChange is a platform to help users and their communities document weather in their own backyards, bringing greater visibility to effects of climate change through multimedia storytelling. Samantha and Amber chat with Caroline, Citizen Science's co-host, about how they got started with ISeeChange, the work that they do, and their recommendations for others to get started documenting changes in weather and climate. A transcript can be accessed here.

This episode features a conversation between Kyle Copas, Communications Manager at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which is known as GBIF, and John Turnbull, the Sydney, Australian coordinator for Reef Life Survey. The focus of this conversation is citizen science data: how it’s collected, what happens to it, and what is the process from collection by citizen scientists to the transformation and processing that brings the data into GBIF’s index. A transcript can be accessed here.

Our first "mini-sode" is an interview with Dr. Jessica Wardlaw at the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab talking about the Slavery From Space project, which allows allows users to contribute to the antislavery movement by mapping the locations of activities in which people are frequently found to be enslaved. A transcript of the episode can be accessed here.

Our first episode features a conversation about Stall Catchers, a game that asks volunteers to examine stalled blood vessels in videos of mice brains to advance the understanding of Alzheimer’s disease. We talk with Pietro Michelucci, director of the Human Computation Institute, and Guy Caulkins, a “Super Catcher” who not only helps catch these vessels, but has also utilized his marketing experience to plan the Stall Catchers Megathon on April 13th. A transcript can be accessed here.